For three weeks we have been challenged by new content in the Crusader’s Coliseum. As we approach week 4, it is time to start thinking about how to prepare for our newest challenge: The Twin Valkyrs. This fight looks to be quite interesting and fun, and I am looking forward to it very much!

Spiritus over at tank spot has again done an analysis of how he thinks the encounter is going to work. There is also a very good video of the 10 man version embeded in his link that is work watching. I have also uncovered this video of the encounter that is worth a viewing.

Getting GRID Ready

There are a few abilities that should be considered bring added to GRID to assist with tracking what is happening with the encounter (please keep in mind that at this point, this is mostly speculation, and that you may need to update or make changes based on your own experiences with the encounter):

Touch of Darkness – Will cause damage to the affected player and those around him (speculated) under the effect of Light Essence.

You may want to track this so that you know who may potentially be taking extra damage from Touch of Darkness. This may end up being information overload, however, and you may not want to see all this information.

Touch of Light – Will cause damage to the affected player and those around him (speculated) under the effect of Dark Essence.

Like the Light Essence, you may want to track this so that you know who may potentially be taking extra damage from Touch of Light. This may end up being information overload, however, and you may not want to see all this information.

Twin Spike– I am not entirely certain if this will be a debuff on the tank, or a buff on the mob. I will be adding it to my GRID on the first night just to be safe, as if it is a debuff on the tank, it will be important to know. However, I do suspect that this will be a buff to the mob.

Empowered Darkness and Empowered Light – You may want to consider adding these to Grid to know who has what debuffs, although it looks like players are visually marked on their characters to reflect this. I suspect that it will be more information than you need to see in your UI, and I will probably not be adding it to my GRID…however if I do, I will add it as a corner box.

A Few Notes of Import for Healers

There looks to be a few things that healers are going to want to be aware of throughout the course of the encounter, as extra healing will be required:

Power of the Twins – This buff will increase the damage dealt by 30% and allow the twins to dual wield for 15 seconds.

What this means as a healer is that your tank will not only be getting hit harder, but with more frequency. You will want to make sure that you are aware of this buff so that you can boost the healing that you are doing to your tank. You may also want to rotate tank/healer cooldowns for this.

Dark Vortex and Light Vortex – Will cause ~6000 damage every second for 5 seconds

The raid should be “attuning” themselves to avoid this damage, however healers should be ready to heal if a tick or so of this gets to anyone in the raid.

Surge of Darkness and Surge of Light – Will cause 1500 damage every 2 seconds to dark/light enemies.

While most of this should be mitigated via interrupts (I think!), be ready for someone to be slow and need some extra healing.

Another ability that healers will want to be aware of, and perhaps use cooldowns to help make healing a bit easier.

I hope that this is helpful for everyone that is facing this encounter over the next few days. I will update this post with any changes, thoughts or suggestions that I have after I have some first hand experience :)

I don’t know about you, but I found this encounter to be undertuned. We one-shot it last night (after the hotfix). I think Faction Champions is a far more difficult fight and Blizz should rethink the tuning or placement of the Valkyrs.

@Sydera – I agree that the encounter does not seem as challenging as the Faction Champions. I can only think that its hard mode version will be more difficult?

Although, with as easy as the 4 encounters have been to date, I am curious on how the hard modes have been tuned. Most of the ToC encounters seem easier than the encounters in Ulduar. So, does that mean that the “Heroic ” version will be somewhere between Ulduar Normal difficulty and Ulduar Hard Mode difficulty (as they’ve said some Ulduar hard modes were a bit over the top)?

It would seem drastic to me if they took a very large jump in difficulty after having tuned the normal mode as they have.

Creative Commons

If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru